Premiere 2026 @ The Skirball Center NYU
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Barcelona, Map of Shadows is takes place in a single evening during the radio broadcast of Maria Callas’ 1956 studio recording of La Boheme. The opera within the opera is heard intermittently in 5 scenes in which HE and SHEask their renters – a French teacher, a second-string soccer player turned security guard, and a young Latin American immigrant – to move out so that they can be left alone in the waning days of HE’s terminal illness. In each encounter the contradictions and secret entanglements of their lives are revealed alongside the past and future of their city, haunted by the Spanish Civil War and the erasure of its cultural identity due to globalization. Like the city in which they live, the characters’ identities are not fixed, their shifting subjectivities undo the social codings of high and low class, masculine and feminine, center and margin. Far from being a story of gentrification and nostalgia,  it instead transports you to those mysterious, marginal, concealed spaces that exist in the realm of everyday urban life where identity is always elusive.

Co-Produced with American Opera Projects.

Barcelona, Map of Shadows is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.